


The Blade of the Golden Queen:

by TheLightdancer



Series: Tumblr Same Prompt Party 2021 [3]
Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: F/F, Galaxia is her own warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 15:53:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30108363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Relationships: Aino Minako/Hino Rei
Series: Tumblr Same Prompt Party 2021 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2142699
Kudos: 8





	The Blade of the Golden Queen:

Hino Rei had never been a normal child, not by anyone’s standards. From the beginning she had looked into fire and seen things. She had seen her mother leaving when she was a very young child, too young to understand the tears or the allegations said against her. She had seen other things, a girl with long pigtails and blonde hair around whom a high doom was built. She had seen the fate that awaited them all, transformed into the immortal avatars of a war against the Great Enemy in the stars. It was a bitter life that Tsukino Usagi had brought them in a way, but it was not the worst of all lives.

She knew that because it had given her a love she’d never anticipated. For all that she had memories, vague and ill-formed, of a relationship with Jadeite in the past, she had clearer ones of Mars and Venus, the cruel and stern warlord of the Senshi and her swaggering moods turning into a surprisingly tender and caring lover in her arms. Mars and Venus were full-grown women of ageless face and longevity that was…..long, if ill-determined in length. Hino Rei was still a girl of sixteen, or she had been.

She was a girl of sixteen, with a long life ahead of her, a very long life if she counted what she became when she took the henshin and spoke those words. Her life had changed from them, she had gone from being Hino Rei, Senator’s daughter, granddaughter of the Miko of one of the most crucial Shinto shrines where the Kami and mortals met in the liminal spaces of the world, to becoming the Senshi of Mars, an immortal being only human by analogy and aspects of appearance.

From seeing the future in fires, she had become an avatar of fire, wielding power named after the planet of War. And that too was subject to misunderstandings. Real war was a thing of chaos that required deep planning, the ability to know in a matter of hours what would need to be done two weeks from where it was done, and the will and the driving force to bring it to pass. She had been named after the God of War, as a Senshi, but people thought of the wrong God. It was not Ares, as the Greeks would have had it, from whom Mars’s Senshi drew their nature. It was Athena, Goddess of Strategy and the cold intellectual sides of war.

And that brought her here. The Outer Senshi had gone to face the new threat that had come here, after all the drama with the Starlights. The real threat, come round at last, revealing herself with the brutal murder of their princess. Uranus had been grief stricken at that sight and had promised Star Fighter that the Outers, the true foe revealed, would offer them vengeance. And then they hadn’t come back.

Now the figure that stood before her and Mina with a detached face and a sword in her hand had strange jewels in a necklace. One had gilded elements but otherwise had a color not unlike that of a kalamata olive (and the implications there made Rei feel nauseous and Mars enraged). There were others, deep violet, bright straw, aqua-green. The being that stood before them looked to her now, with seeming interest and distaste.

“This is not your time to die, Mars.”

Venus looked to her likewise with desperation. Not Aino Minako briefly flashing into Venus’s eyes, the stern and cruel and even vengeful Sailor V, the general who’d ruled by terror in the old days and yet had power in this one to do that if she willed it.

“Mars, please,” she said, and the soft aura of begging briefly brought her short.

The other one just smiled, coldly.

“Ah, I see what this is. I hope the two of you have had the chances to speak of it. When the other ones died….”

And her eyes tracked something that neither of them could quite see.

“They died with their names on their lips. The aqua-haired one died trying to touch the hand of the golden-haired one, crying her real name.”

And then the golden-armored demon’s face was carved in an imitation of grief that was the more horrid for clearly lacking an understanding of the emotion in any truthful sense.

“Haruka, no!”

Venus’s eyes whipped back to her.

“When they die and I gain their Star-Seeds I gain all kinds of knowledge, including that they did not know they had. You thought Uranus weak, once. Her last couple of thoughts were ‘Venus was right’ and then ‘Michiru’. And that aqua-haired one had only one name in her mind, the one I just spoke. I wonder what I’ll see from yours, Guardian Venus?”

The creature laughed, then, and raised her blade.

Mars and Rei were two different people. One lonely and haunted by the future, the other immortal, a living storm of fire who summoned cleansing fires to banish evil and the dark forces that lurked on worlds and within the stars themselves. Galaxia was not precisely a dark force but the evil within her was crueler than Beryl or even Pharaoh 90. Both were united in one thing. They would not see Venus die in front of them, even if the monster had killed others more powerful than the two of them together in raw power.

“You won’t kill her,” she growled, and there was a lioness’s roar in the words.

Galaxia looked at her with disdain. “I have waged war across the Galaxy, child, Worlds break before me. As with the children of Kinmoku, so with the children of Earth. They all died in my opening strike and only you, the Senshi, remain. And one by one I shall hunt you down and slay you all. It is the way of things. The unworthy die, and I, alone, and worthy, live beneath the weight of the infinite stars.”

Galaxia’s smile took a nastier edge, to a point that Rei would have not been surprised to see those teeth become fangs even though technically they had not.

“You have the signs of a seer, girl. All of you see death at the hands of a terrible swift sword. My sword. So then shall it be.”

“No,” growled Mars again, the lioness’s roar more audible. This was the vision she’d seen in the flames, and it was the point where she vowed not to go gently into that good night, and to rage against the dying of the light. The only thing that mattered was to give Mina a chance to flee. Mina was the true general, the true daughter of war. She could not be more than a delay on the terrible visions of a dark and cruel force manipulating this golden angel of light into serving as its own proxy.

That did not matter.

Fires erupted around her, giving her body an eerie glow. Mars and Hino as one, their souls combined, and for a moment, just a moment, she was Eternal Sailor Mars not just in name but in fact.

“You will not touch her,” she snarled, and then fires erupted outward, slamming with bolts of energy into Galaxia’s armor and she summoned her mandala, which grasped the golden witch’s gauntlets and dragged the blades downward.

The creature smiled, then, stark and cold and cruel, and as she snapped her way clean through the fires as if they were nothing she froze when a blow of stupendous strength launched by Mars struck her chin with an uppercut enhanced by her henshin to make it count more solidly. Part of her hoped that Mako would have approved.

And the monster reeled for a moment, staggered.

She turned to Venus, her eyes gleaming with the hallowed fires within her.

“Run, Venus. I love y-“

Motion, gold glinting illuminated by her fires and a wrenching pain, only for her to summon her flames to strike back along the blade, the purity and the purification lancing against the Chaos-threaded nature of the power within the blade, the corrupted desire for domination and proving greatness against others.

Galaxia groaned for a moment in genuine agony and then she stepped back, as Mars gave her an insolent smile.

Even as she began to fade, she told her “I told you would not touch her.”

Galaxia’s eyes were troubled, as if some deep secret were unveiled and then there was a blissful quietness…..before she awoke in a strange place within the walls of reality and without. Her chest hurt, but here she was. And with her, Hotaru , Mamoru (and her eyes suddenly went very wide as she realized the _real_ truth lurking behind that ‘went to America’ line, and what Usagi must have repressed all along), Haruka, and Michiru. And beyond them all, meditating in quietness, Kakyuu.

Mars sighed then, sinking to her knees. The lioness had roared….and she did not know if it would be enough.

\----------

Not long after but far too long for all of them, after the horrors of resurrection in the flesh as a soulless thing and her star-seed watching in horror as the thing that had been her in the flesh had turned on Usagi and at the way that Serenity uncaged dispelled them all with eyes of stark ice as Usagi collapsed and Serenity rose then, and fought the epic duel with Galaxia and then somehow, impossibly, defeated those forces, she was alive again.

Gloriously, blissfully alive.

Her hand held Aino’s, and they were Hino and Aino. Aino’s eyes met hers and there were all those layers and quiet griefs.

“I’m sorry,” Mina began, but she put her finger to her lips.

“No. None of us but Usagi could have done that. All that matters to me is that you got to live, to give that warning.”

Aino’s smile was sad and her hands reached out to caress Rei’s left cheek and her right shoulder.

“My lioness,” she said, acknowledging what she had seen in the desperation of Mars and the way that the Senshi and the human had merged to try to save her.

Those words, the knowledge of what was in them, and the little looks in her eyes led Rei to do a most un-Rei thing and to briefly break, holding her, as both of them let the tears fall that they had not let fall at first when they were resurrected and gloriously, blissfully alive.

It was a warm afternoon in March, both their hands clasped when the tears fell, their bodies close together. The wind, Haruka’s sphere, reached out to ruffle their hair as it did all the Senshi, the wind reminding them that they had been through things together and the old schisms healed in a change between visions of a future that neither wished to think about more.

“In like a lamb, out like a lion,” Mina mused. Normally Rei would have rolled her eyes and corrected Mina’s misspoken use of phrasing, but here there was nothing that meant more than both of them being alive and the feeling of Mina’s body next to hers. They lay on the grass in the park on a blanket together. The long strife was over, and only when the cold came and the hours of destiny called would things change.

Rei let herself smile. The lioness had roared, in the end, and the one she’d wished to save had been safe. Her eyes closed, and she fell into a sleep of warm dreams and the understanding that was there was there, the words unspoken right now, for the actions that had been there had spoken still more loudly.


End file.
